


At Ilium, Or On A Train

by catinthedark



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, french grammar, iliad references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 16:47:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3297440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catinthedark/pseuds/catinthedark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes falls from a train in the alps, Patroclus on the field of battle before the gates of Ilium. </p><p>This is what happens to those who are left alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Ilium, Or On A Train

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know quite what this is I just had to write it. Please correct my French if necessary, it's been awhile since I've done anything approaching grammar study and I was never that good at it to start off with. Also any inconsistencies with the Iliad bits I'm probably aware of, it's just ~~artistic license because honestly there are too many things that happen there for me to be able to get all of them into the space I want.

* * *

 

_At Ilium, on first hearing of the warrior Patroclus’ death, the hero Achilles defiled his body with ash, and fell to the ground as if dead. There he screamed, it is told, loud enough in his grief to reach his mother the sea nymph Thetis where she sat at the very bottom of the ocean._

_At Ilium, the hero Achilles screamed, and he swore vengeance on Hector. Achilles knew his promise would be the death of him._

_He didn’t care._

 

* * *

 

On a train in the Alps, hurtling at break neck speed through mountains under snow, Steve Rogers yells out, and can’t reach far enough, and then Bucky Barnes is gone and Steve forgets how to breathe, how to speak, how to think _—_

One of the Howling Commandos pulls him back into the train. His body is stiff, barely co-opoerative.

When the time comes, he walks off into the snow like a corpse made animate. His hands are shaking; it isn't for the cold.

(Steve Rogers will not remember this later: only the grasping fingers of the icy wind on his outstretched hand, the sick pulling emptiness where Bucky used to be. This, this is the first thing that Steve Rogers will remember, when he looks back on the events that come after Bucky’s fall):

Jones is speaking to Dernier in French. Steve hears it as if he is underwater, distorted and far away.

“ _Il est tombé_.”

Tomber: to fall. The verb is ominous, heavy on the tongue. It sounds like an empty grave. In Bucky’s case, Steve realises, belatedly, horrifyingly, it will be. 

“ _Barnes. il est tombé du train_ .” 

Dernier looks pale and disbelieving. They all do.  

Steve doesn’t want to know what he looks like. 

He doesn’t, _can’t_ , pay any attention to his surroundings. The group of them, they might still be on the train, or they could be in the snow on the alps. The Howling Commandos are all gathered together, and they all look very grim. There are puffs of condensation in the air from their breathing. 

Steve is breathing too, he realises. He blinks.

He is standing upright, on his own feet. 

By some hideous twist of fate, he is alive, and Bucky is dead. 

 

* * *

_ At Ilium, the hero Achilles strode unarmoured onto the plains in front of the city, where a battle raged on over the body of Patroclus. Patroclus had been wearing Achilles' armour when he was killed; Hector had taken it.  _

_ Achilles strode unarmoured onto the field of battle, and the goddess Athene helped him. She gave him a bright coronet of flames, and the shield of her father Zeus slung over his shoulder.  _

_ Together they screamed thrice, and their wrathful noise was enough to drive the Trojan forces back into their high walled city, and Achilles retrieved the body of his fallen companion from where it lay on the hot ground. _

_ At Ilium, the hero Achilles took the body back to his tent. He clung to it all night.  _

 

* * *

 

Languages are getting muddled up in Steve's head. Jones and Dernier are speaking French in a corner; he can hear them all too clearly. Lullabies his mother used to sing him in Gaelic, disjointed  orders in German, military, always shouted-- _Halt! Nicht schießen!_

The important part, in whichever language: they cannot retrieve the body. 

"We have to— _il faut que nous—_ "

Steve isn't sure what he's saying, but he knows that it needs to be said. Bucky's body, lost to the ice and snow, the ravine. His body—

"He's just _—_ how _can_ you _—_ "

Everyone stays back when he's angry, he notices. Out of range of his limbs, like it'd make any difference if he really wanted to hurt them—Steve is sickened with himself the moment the thought crosses his mind. He subsides, folds his arms up close to his chest and hunches into himself. 

They get on an army plane and fly back to London. 

 

* * *

 

  _At Ilium, Achilles swore vengeance, meant to give his life up to it._

 _My knight Patroclus_ —

 

* * *

 

Steve Rogers sits in a bombed-out bar, and tries to be alone with his thoughts. 

He has made a cursory attempt to get drunk. He doesn't think it will work and nor does he particularly hope for it, only that it seems like the thing he ought to do. People drink when they want to forget, to be numb, to be dizzy and halfway out of their minds and unsure of which way is up and which is down, let alone anything more complicated. 

Steve thinks: I know Bucky better than I ever knew up or down, better than my own name. I wouldn't forget. I won't forget. I don't want to forget. Not him. 

Peggy comes in to talk to him. She is always very certain, Peggy Carter, very sure, and she can shoot a man dead-on at a hundred paces and knows how to find a dress that matches her neat bright red lipstick. 

Steve Rogers is in love with her. He's only starting to realise that now. 

Another tragedy;  Bucky was his, and he'll be hers.  Steve is feeling very cynical tonight.

He thinks about telling her: I don't think I'm going to survive this battle. _Je ne pense pas que je survive cette bataille_ —Jones was telling him about the subjunctive mood last week. For uncertainty, desire, necessity. _Il faut que je le fasse_.He likes the hiss at the end of the _fasse_ , grim and somehow still unsure. Prior to this, he had never thought grammar could be so expressive.

He thinks about telling her: I might love you. _  
_

Steve has been doing altogether too much thinking of late. He needs action now, a fight, a resolution to whatever this story may be. 

 

* * *

 

_At Ilium, the hero Achilles in his rage and his grief battled two gods of the rivers, and when he killed Hector, at long last, he laughed and he mocked him, and he dragged the body back to the hollow ships of the Achaeans, leaving his family grieving and keeping his soul from rest._

_ The funeral pyre for Patroclus burned all night, and a great games were played all the next day in his honour. _

_ Achilles kept fighting, ferocious and strong, until Paris from the walls of the city loosed an arrow and brought him darkness_ _. _

__

* * *

 

On the plane, as Peggy's radio transmission cuts out and Steve loses someone else, or she loses him—

After that, he understands that nothing he or anyone else could do would ever be enough, after Bucky died. 

No body, miraculously recovered, no funeral honors or vengeance or alcohol could ever be enough, because the only thing that would be _enough—_ in any real sense of the word—would be Bucky himself, alive back from the dead. 

Steve fights a man who believes himself to have the power of a god. And he might, but Steve has a feeling that they are entering into an age where the power of gods is not so uncommon as one would like to think. 

Steve wins, or as close to it as he is likely to get. The Red Skull is gone; millions of people are saved. There's a satisfaction in a job well done, regardless of the cost.

There is another, grimmer, satisfaction in knowing that what he is heading for, as his plane rapidly loses altitude, is nothing more than what he has been cheating, time and time again, since he was a sickly child in the coldest winter New York had seen for years. 

A dance—that's the sum total of Steve's unfinished business. (This is what he tells himself as he is going into the ice; it's a lot more than just a dance, even he knows that.)

He doesn't want to think about this. 

Peggy—her voice, her steady hands—

Red lipstick, smudged onto his lips when he kissed her—

That dress—Bucky—

A bullet from nowhere—behind him to keep him safe—

Lamplight—another kiss—laughter, warmth—

Home—

Sarah Rogers singing in the kitchen—

 

* * *

 

_At Ilium, w hen the hero Achilles died, his ashes were  mingled together in the same golden urn as Patroclus.'  _

_ They would not be separated again, in this life or the next. _

 

* * *

 

There are no urns of gold in the ice, here at the end. There are no graves, no funeral games, only the howling of the wind and the insistent lapping of salt waves against metal, the bone deep cold. This is no place for the living; how could there possibly be anything more?

It is a comfort, if a very small one, that both he and Bucky are encased frozen in ice at their deaths, united by their final acts and resting places.

A sacrifice and a fall; a frozen grave.

 

* * *

 

Temporary, more or less.

 

 


End file.
